Alan Truex: Baseball got squeezed in London but the Brits loved it

After Queen Elizabeth attended her first major-league baseball game – 1991 in Baltimore – she remarked, “Seemed like nothing much happened.”

She would not have said that after the New York Yankees and Boston Red Sox played their weekend series in London.  There was more action in the first inning than you’d see in an entire day of cricket. Or soccer.

Queen Elizabeth didn’t get to see it, but her grandson, Prince Harry did, accompanied by wife Meghan, who was born in Los Angeles of mixed ethnicity and thinks she’s distantly related to Mookie Betts.  I long ago learned that the color of a woman’s skin is not a reliable clue to her ethnicity, so she can have it however she wants. It will never be an issue unless she wants to emigrate to the USA, which one of the royal family once did, prior to World War II.

There’s always something amusing about Brits and Yanks mixing — such a clash of the world’s most similar cultures. They take our American hot dog and make it two feet long.  Really?  

Mostly I yield to them on culture; they have the greater writers and musicians and painters.  But you move to sports, and now we have the upper hand, the quicker feet, and maybe more grit.  Give them soccer, but we dominate, for the most part, in two international games they invented – tennis and golf.  

So professional baseball was played in England for the first time, and it went about as well as you’d expect. 

It was impossible to shoehorn a baseball park into a 90,000-seat soccer rectangle, London’s Wembley Stadium.  It had foul areas the size of a tennis court. To be able to catch up to foul pops, the corner outfielders had to open up the gaps for doubles.  

The grass was mostly artificial and very slick, causing grounders to dart through the infield like they were lasers.  

The weather was more oppressive than it ever is in London – 92 degrees F, 41% humidity.  That had to add to the pitchers’ discomfort. 

All that said, I was proud of how my countrymen played in the field.  I was amazed by how they recalibrated to such a strange ballpark. With some treacherous shadowing from its soaring grandstands.

 “This is a band box they’re playing in,” said MLB Network’s Harold Reynolds.  “It’s 385 feet to center field, compared to 420 in Fenway. And the ball was jumping off the bat, carrying really well.  Luke Voit doubled to center with a pop fly that Mookie Betts would easily catch anywhere else.”

The batters benefited from the tall, wide blackboard across center field.  They could not have asked for a more helpful background.

The fielders played gracefully and the batters launched at all the right angles, but pitching was not to be found.  The two games took nine hours. The first game had 30 runs and the second one had 20. 

Some 60,000 Londoners came to see it, and we gave them Arena Football.

I blame the weird conditions and the frazzled, less than first-rate pitchers.  There was too much distortion for them to deal with. Larry Rothschild, pitching coach of the Yankees, called it “Coors Field on steroids.”

In Saturday’s opener, both starting pitchers were knocked out in the first inning.  I won’t print their names, no need to embarrass them. There were 12 runs in the first inning, a major-league record.

If you turn a baseball game into longball, history tells you the New York Yankees will humiliate you.  That’s what they did with their 17-13, 12-8 beatdowns.

Has a defending champion ever been so humbled? “It was eye-opening,” Red Sox manager Alex Cora said.  “Top to bottom, they’re a lot better than us right now.”

Which is not to say the Yankees have nothing to worry about – not with their cobbled-together starting rotation.

This was an event so atypical that it’s probably a mistake to judge it as athletic competition.  More importantly, as ridiculous as it looked to my tired American eyes, the Brits seemed to love every minute of it.  Baseball is a game of speed and explosion, and its rules are relatively simple. It can catch on, and already has found appeal among youths in Holland, Germany and the Czech Republic.

Rob Manfred has a vision that someday London will have a team in the American League East.  He will argue that flying from New York to London is not that much different from traveling to the West coast.  Planes can get faster. Remember the Concorde? Like it or not – and so far I do — we have seen a glimpse of the future.